The Mark of the Beast

by Sydney Watson

The whole of the three-and-a-half years had been rife with growing horrors, with licentiousness, and every evil possible to the unregenerate mind, and heart, and life, when full license is given to them.

The license and indulgence permitted—even arranged for, in the first instance—by the apostate church with a view to the more perfect enslavement of the world's worshippers, had brought forth a full harvest of evil. The effect of license is disorder, and presently anarchy. For three-years-and-a-half the apostate church had grown in assumption and in all abominations, and the effects of the license permitted, and fearfully abused, had produced a condition of things which became such an intolerable burden, that the time had become ripe for the authority in all this, to be destroyed.

The apostate church was the cause and the authority for all the excess of evil of the times, hence the ten-kingdomed confederacy which had at first buttressed the impious system, now, by united action, destroyed it. "And the ten horns which thou sawest, and the Beast, these shall hate the harlot, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and shall BURN HER UTTERLY WITH FIRE. For God did put in their hearts to do His mind, AND TO COME TO ONE MIND, and to give their Kingdom unto the Beast, until the words of God shall be accomplished." (Rev. 17:16-17)

"Man is a religious animal!" And Lucien Apleon, endowed with special wisdom of his father and Master—the Devil—recognized this necessity for a religion from the outset of his career.

The Devil has always recognized religion, encouraged it, and has even instigated it in a hundred forms, during the last 6,000 years. Only every effort of his Satanic power and force has been directed towards the luring of the religious soul away from God. The Devil is a Ritualist! He loves to entangle souls in a ritual, and the more sensuous the ritual, the better he is pleased, because such sensuousness and ritualism ministers to the "flesh," and while men and women's religion is fleshly, it cannot be spiritual. And the FATHER seeketh spiritual worshippers, "for they that worship Him, must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth." Then, too, Satan knows that all religiousness that is of the "flesh," tends to make its devotees anxious for the development of a good-self within them, while true, spiritual life in Christ, leads to the continual consciousness that "in me, that is IN MY FLESH, dwelleth no good thing."

Lucien Apleon encouraged religion, but not the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ—for he, Apleon was The Anti-Christ. It was he, with his emissaries, taught and guided by Satan, the Arch-enemy of God, and of His Christ, that had subtlety, secretly energized the world-religion, that followed the taking away of the church. That world-wide system had been an amalgamation of all the then existing false systems of religion. With the taking away of the church every type of license had been gradually permitted to the worshippers in the churches of this infernal system, until, at last, as we have seen, the governments had been compelled to abolish what at first they had helped to establish—for license had bred such a character and temper in the peoples that it became a menace to all order.

All this was part of Satan's organized plan, for, when the moment of the crushing out of this licentious, abominable religious system arrived, his plans, as regarded Lucien Apleon, The Anti-christ, were so perfected, by the ripeness of the world for the Anti-christ rule, that all else seemed plain sailing.

The poor, duped world knew Apleon only as the great SUPER-MAN, "long looked-for, come at last," the World's Deliverer, who was presently to be universally acclaimed as the World's Dictator.

The world had long been familiar with the system of private chaplains attached to great men's households. It was familiar knowledge to them that Dan, the Free-booter, (in the days of "The Judges") must needs have a renegade, runaway Levite for a priest, his salary thirty shillings a year, a suit of clothes and his victuals (as much as a renegade was worth). Absalom could do little, in his revolt, without the religious brand, so must needs have Ahithophel. And down to their own times, the World, at the period of Apleon's coming, was familiar with private chaplains.

Apleon's chaplain, a swarthy-skinned Jew (to all outward appearance,) was undoubtedly like Apleon himself, a Satanic resurrection, or if not a resurrection, certainly energized by the same infernal power. The Holy Ghost calls this man "The False Prophet." He exercised all the authority of Anti-christ, "in his presence," as well as in his absence. Eight times the emphatic word "he causeth" is written of him, by the Holy Spirit, and a more hideous, lying, extraordinarily wicked catalogue of deeds is no where else to be found in the world's history: